Brian Groenke
bgroenke.bsky.social
Brian Groenke
@bgroenke.bsky.social
Scientist, (Bayesian) data nerd, software engineer, and researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research @pik-potsdam.bsky.social working at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and computational geoscience. Opinions my own.
Reposted by Brian Groenke
“We need to start, now, to reduce CO2 emissions from fossil-fuels, by at least 5% per year. This must happen in order to have a chance to avoid unmanageable & extremely costly climate impacts affecting all people in the world.” PIKs J. Rockström @theguardian.com
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Cop30: Scientists warn countries must act decisively to protect people and life or risk ‘suffering for billions’ – as it happened
As president Lula tries to find common ground between negotiating countries, planetary scientists say emissions must be urgently cut
www.theguardian.com
November 20, 2025 at 11:21 AM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
"Matlab is the Visual Basic 6 of technical computing." #HeardAtJuliaCon #JuliaCon #JuliaLang
October 3, 2025 at 11:04 AM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
“Over the past 20 years, Paris has undergone a major physical transformation, trading automotive arteries for bike lanes, adding green spaces and eliminating 50,000 parking spaces.

Part of the payoff has been invisible — in the air itself.”

Leadership, strategy, real action, common sense. #Paris
Paris said au revoir to cars. Air pollution maps reveal a dramatic change.
Air pollution fell substantially as the city restricted car traffic and made way for parks and bike lanes.
www.washingtonpost.com
August 29, 2025 at 4:57 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Breaking News!
Code Yikes!

Yesterday, Antarctic sea-ice extent reached 4 standard deviations below the 1991-2020 daily mean. The only other years on record where this has happened are 2023 and 2024.

In a normal distribution, 4 SD's represents a 1-in-31,600 event. These are not normal times.
July 21, 2025 at 12:17 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
“It would be a huge mistake to deviate from 1.5.” PIK Director Johan Rockström and other leading scientists spoke to @newyorker.com about the realities of delayed emissions reductions and the dire consequences of giving up hope.
www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...
Is There Still Time to Be Hopeful About the Climate?
Scientists have long insisted that we can and must limit global warming to 1.5 degrees—and some still do, even as that grim milestone nears.
www.newyorker.com
July 11, 2025 at 10:05 AM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
"Auch ohne Klimawandel gibt es Extreme. Aber in einer Welt mit #Klimawandel häufen sich diese Extreme und das ist der Punkt", so PIK-Meteorologe Peter Hoffmann. Im Gespräch mit rbb24 spricht er über den Potsdamer Dürre-Rekord, Ursache & Folgen der Extreme:

➡️ www.ardmediathek.de/video/Y3JpZD...
July 2, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
This plot from NYTimes is getting a lot of play today. Let me just note that calculating a 15 year trend ending w/ an El Nino-boosted interval is the sort of thing that would make Dick Lindzen blush (excerpt from "The Hockey Stick & the Climate Wars" (www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-hockey...)
June 27, 2025 at 2:02 AM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Sustainable development needs strong climate protection, says PIK scientist Jessica Strefler at #SB62. Current policies still lead to costly damages, esp. in poorer countries. Stronger emission cuts are crucial & can help to reduce inequality.
More info: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
June 19, 2025 at 12:35 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Good Science

xkcd.com/3101/
June 12, 2025 at 8:28 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Europe's economic woes have nothing to do with #ClimatePolicy, says PIK Director Ottmar #Edenhofer in an interview with @ftm.eu. “Climate damage is going to be a fundamental threat to our #Economy and prosperity.”
www.ftm.eu/articles/ott... (€)
Europe's economic woes have nothing to do with climate policy, says ex-Merkel advisor
European industry is wrong to blame the Green Deal for its own failures, according to Ottmar Edenhofer, a leading climate economist. To remain economically competitive, the EU must stick to its ambiti...
www.ftm.eu
June 4, 2025 at 7:53 AM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Looked at the report to see how they evaluated model performance and what a surprise - the reported accuracy metrics are based on randomly sampled datapoints. Spatial data is not i.i.d., and model evaluation is the hardest part of any ML project (but not as fun as trying a dozen model architectures)
So this week in the world of farm/environment/land management/ mapping has been “interesting”

And by “interesting” I mean “verging on the utterly bonkers”

Why? Well this week started with Natural England launching a new map

naturalengland.blog.gov.uk/2025/05/12/a...
A new peat map for England
By Dr Ruth Waters, Director for Evidence, Natural England, and David Jones, Senior Responsible Officer for the Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment, Defra England’s peat deposits are one of our mo...
naturalengland.blog.gov.uk
May 19, 2025 at 7:58 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Scientists show that +1.5 °C is far too warm for Earth's ice sheets and will result in several metres of sea-level rise over the coming centuries, extensive loss and damage to coastal populations and will challenge the implementation of adaptation measures

www.nature.com/articles/s43...
Warming of +1.5 °C is too high for polar ice sheets - Communications Earth & Environment
Warming of +1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels is too high for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and even the current climate forcing of +1.2 °C is likely to lead to several meters of sea-level ...
www.nature.com
May 20, 2025 at 10:59 AM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
New article about AI/LLMs capabilities to summarised scientific research

TL;DR: It's bad, and the new ones are performing worse
Generalization bias in large language model summarization of scientific research | Royal Society Open Science
Artificial intelligence chatbots driven by large language models (LLMs) have the potential to increase public science literacy and support scientific research, as they can quickly summarize complex sc...
royalsocietypublishing.org
May 14, 2025 at 5:49 AM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
This is horrible. I don't even know what to say. Some of our most key polar data.

"As a result, the level of services for affected products below will be reduced to Basic—meaning they will remain accessible but may not be actively maintained, updated, or fully supported."

nsidc.org/data/user-re...
May 6, 2025 at 8:08 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
If you, like us, think that these kinds of community activity are needed, we warmly invite you to get involved in AgML. So far, we've created benchmark datasets, organised a workshop, Kaggle competition and there's so much more we'd like to do - join our mailing list: mail.agml.org/mailman/list...
AgML Info Page
mail.agml.org
April 28, 2025 at 1:47 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
“If everything goes right, none of you will be able to afford food, housing, or retirement ever again.” theonion.com/trump-says-r...
Trump Says Recession Unfortunate But Necessary Step To Get To Depression
WASHINGTON—Warning that Americans should brace themselves for an economic “period of transition,” President Donald Trump told reporters Monday that a recession would be an unfortunate but necessary st...
theonion.com
March 11, 2025 at 12:32 AM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Impressive red #Arctic in February with temperatures around 20°C above average, high enough for sea ice to melt.
In #Europe the average temperature for February was 0.40°C above the reference period according to the #Copernicus #Climate Change Service (C3S). #climateemergency @eumetsat.int
March 10, 2025 at 6:18 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
I am 100% serious when I say that one of the most important skills for a researcher is an exceptional tolerance for feeling stupid. As a researcher, you really have to lean into feeling stupid.
March 8, 2025 at 7:45 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
The ocean is the final victim of multiple planetary crises, suffering from nutrient pollution, excess heat, rising CO₂, explains PIKs Johan Rockström. "This has to be turned around. The ocean will ultimately determine whether we secure a livable future for humanity."
www.weforum.org/videos/earth...
Earth has crossed 6 of 9 dangerous planetary boundaries, says this leading climate scientist
The World Economic Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape glob...
www.weforum.org
March 3, 2025 at 2:01 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
What is happening now is that Kate Calvin, NASA Chief Scientist and Senior Climate Advisor, and Co-Chair of the IPCC WGIII report, was not allowed to attend the IPCC 62 plenary, where the outline of the AR7 Working Group reports is scheduled to be approved.

edition.cnn.com/2025/02/21/c...

4/...
Trump bars federal scientists from working on pivotal global climate report | CNN
The Trump administration told US government scientists working on a vital global climate report to stop their work – the president’s latest move to withdraw the US from global climate action and resea...
edition.cnn.com
February 25, 2025 at 2:09 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
Scientists sound alarm after collecting unprecedented data from world's oceans: 'The broken records ... have become a broken record' by Leslie Sattler for The Cool Down. Read more here:

www.thecooldown.com/outdoors/war...
Scientists sound alarm after collecting unprecedented data from world's oceans: 'The broken records ... have become a broken record'
The warmest ocean temperatures in human history were recorded last year, highlighting the concerning issue of warming oceans.
www.thecooldown.com
February 23, 2025 at 8:17 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
In Nature Climate Change, we show that a year above 1.5 °C signals that Earth is most probably within the 20-year period that will reach the Paris Agreement limit. @natclimchange.bsky.social
A year above 1.5 °C signals that Earth is most probably within the 20-year period that will reach the Paris Agreement limit - Nature Climate Change
What a first year with temperature 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial baseline implies for long-term temperature goals is unclear. Here the authors show that such a first year above the baseline is highl...
www.nature.com
February 10, 2025 at 4:55 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
I hate what deep learning has done to the word "inference". Now we are forced to write sentences in our papers like "approximate inference at inference time"—I'm all for nonsense Dr Seuss language, but not in a scientific paper!
January 23, 2025 at 12:02 PM
Reposted by Brian Groenke
🚀 Join the 4th SBI Hackathon! 🚀
The last SBI hackathon was a fantastic milestone in forming a collaborative open-source community around SBI. Be part of it this year as we build on that momentum!

📅 March 17–21, 2025
📍 Tübingen, Germany or remote
👉 Details: github.com/sbi-dev/sbi/...

More Info:🧵👇
January 14, 2025 at 3:58 PM